High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation

[Excerpt] In High Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists, High Tech and High Touch demonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs

Touch Typing Tutor for visually impaired children and young people

Touch Typing Tutor is a software programme which was designed to assist teaching touch typing skills to visually impaired children. It was first designed and written in the 1990s by Graeme Douglas and Alan Gamble and then updated in 2000 and is now available as freeware. The programme was specially designed to meet the needs of visually impaired people (in particular children and young people). For example, it provides the means to set up different colours, dimensions and fonts for the exercise text displayed, and has speech capability. These features make it possible for Touch Typing Tutor to be operated independently by the learner. This program is easy to use, with a full set of touch typing exercises supplied. Additional exercises can easily be created using any text editor which is capable of writing plain ASCII files (e.g. the Windows 'Notepad'), and organised into lessons. This means that you are able to use Touch Typing Tutor to teach according to the scheme of your choice - no particular approach is built into the program itself - even replacing the entire suite of lessons with your own if you wish. The software has been used extensively in the UK as well as other parts of the world (particularly Africa)

Multi Stage based Time Series Analysis of User Activity on Touch Sensitive Surfaces in Highly Noise Susceptible Environments

This article proposes a multistage framework for time series analysis of user activity on touch sensitive surfaces in noisy environments. Here multiple methods are put together in multi stage framework; including moving average, moving median, linear regression, kernel density estimation, partial differential equations and Kalman filter. The proposed three stage filter consisting of partial differential equation based denoising, Kalman filter and moving average method provides ~25% better noise reduction than other methods according to Mean Squared Error (MSE) criterion in highly noise susceptible environments. Apart from synthetic data, we also obtained real world data like hand writing, finger/stylus drags etc. on touch screens in the presence of high noise such as unauthorized charger noise or display noise and validated our algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm performs qualitatively better than the existing solutions for touch panels of the high end hand held devices available in the consumer electronics market qualitatively.Comment: 9 pages (including 9 figures and 3 tables); International Journal of Computer Applications (published

Veritas: The Power of the Real

There\u27s something about touching the actual thing, something about contacting the real that makes a distant world come immediately to life. There\u27s an excitement about that moment when you see and touch something a piece of another world. A Thomas the Tank Engine character reminded me of this fact recently. Watch the young boy\u27s face as he picks Stanley back up in a cornfield after his favorite toy travels to space and back. [excerpt

Islands of the world and the European touch

The notion of a European landscape goes beyond the geo-physical and architectural to encompass also the institutional and socio-cultural. The „European touch‟ includes building codes, languages, educational systems, legal systems, religions, customs, even street furniture and highway codes. Islands have performed the role of prototype “contact zones” by design or default, serving as tentative and experimental spaces of contact and stepping stones between different organisms – flora, fauna, human - in a colonial situation, before they traipsed onto mainlands. They have done so also for the motley manifestations of the European touch. Only the insular Pacific, which was the last major region to experience the European contact, has escaped this ubiquity.peer-reviewe

A Review of Smart Materials in Tactile Actuators for Information Delivery

As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc. In fact, those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Mechanical, electrical, and thermal stimuli can stimulate these receptors and cause different information to be conveyed through the nerves. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed. These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. Smart materials, such as piezoelectric materials, carbon nanotubes, and shape memory alloys, play important roles in providing actuation for tactile sensation. This paper aims to review the background biological knowledge of human tactile sensing, to give an understanding of how we sense and interact with the world through the sense of touch, as well as the conventional and state-of-the-art technologies of tactile actuators for tactile feedback delivery

MetaSpace II: Object and full-body tracking for interaction and navigation in social VR

MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and object placement by building the virtual world on top of a 3D scan of the real world. Through the association between the real and virtual world, users are able to walk freely while wearing a head-mounted device, avoid obstacles like walls and furniture, and interact with people and objects. Most current virtual reality (VR) environments are designed for a single user experience where interactions with virtual objects are mediated by hand-held input devices or hand gestures. Additionally, users are only shown a representation of their hands in VR floating in front of the camera as seen from a first person perspective. We believe, representing each user as a full-body avatar that is controlled by natural movements of the person in the real world (see Figure 1d), can greatly enhance believability and a user's sense immersion in VR.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/metaspace-ii